7. Eric Lander

A former Rhodes scholar, Eric Stephen Lander is currently a professor of biology at MIT and co-chair of President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He won the Westinghouse Prize at 17 for writing a paper on quasiperfect numbers, then sort of bounced around between intellectual fields for a while, teaching managerial economics at Harvard and dabbling in neurobiology. He was writing a book on information theory when he thought to himself: "Hey, I'm gonna go crack the human genome." Any groundbreaking genome-related developments you've heard about were probably influenced by Lander's work in some way.